judiced account of any country not his own was an impossibility. As regards Scotland, the position which he took certainly admitted of justification. "When I find," he said, "a Scotchman to whom an Englishman is as a Scotchman, that Scotchman shall be as an Englishman to me."[1] Boswell, and perhaps Boswell alone, exactly answered this requirement, and the two men were fast friends. For many other Scotchmen, indeed, he had strong feelings of regard, and even of friendship—for Andrew Millar the bookseller, for William Strahan the printer, for Blair, Beattie, John Campbell, Hailes, and Robertson, among authors, and for his poor assistants in the great work of his Dictionary, who all came from across the Tweed. There was no want of individual affection, no John Bull disinclination that had to be overcome in the case of each fresh acquaintance which he made. His "was a prejudice of the head and not of the heart."[2] He held that the Scotch, with that clannishness which is found in almost equal strength in the outlying parts of the whole island, in Cornwall and in Cumberland, achieved for themselves in England "a success which rather exceeded the due proportion of their real merit."[3] Jesting with a friend from Ireland, who feared "he might treat the people of that country more unfavourably than he had done the Scotch," he answered, "Sir, you have no reason to be afraid of me. The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir: the Irish are a fair people;—they never speak well of one another."[4] To Boswell he began a letter, not meant, of course, for the public eye, by saying: "Knowing as you do the disposition of your countrymen to tell lies in favour of each other."[5] When he came to write his Journey, he was led neither by timidity nor false delicacy to conceal what he thought. He attacks that "national combination so invidious that their friends cannot defend it," which is one of the means whereby Scotchmen "find, or make their way to employment, riches, and distinction."[6] He upbraids that "vigilance of jealousy which never goes to sleep,"[7] which sometimes led them to cross the borders of boastfulness and pass into falsehood, when Caledonia was their subject and Englishmen their audience. "A Scotchman," he writes, "must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth; he will always love it better than inquiry."[8] Even in his talk when among Scotchmen
Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/40
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
14
INTRODUCTION
